A few days ago I took part in the Creative Europe event at the Urania Institute in Vienna. Will everything stay as it was? Or will everything change? The Austrian Federal Chancellery invited us to a preliminary meeting about the EU Support Programme Creative Europe.

The presentations and discussions, which most impressed me during the event, were those about the Arts in the current economic climate of ‘anything-goes’; and the struggle for time and inspiration. We need time. We’d like to be given back our time; we’d like time to think, at a leisurely pace. We’d like to be able to write things down slowly, so that they still count for something the next day. We don’t want to be worn down in a throw-away world run by gamblers and cynics. I went home nursing feelings I found difficult to describe. I’m not at all pessimistic either about how we talk to people about literature nor about how we can shape an open Europe. And, in the many years that I’ve spent in the rough and tumble of these affairs, I’ve met many officials in the Arts, who were not only open-minded, thoughtful and well informed, but who were also seriously concerned about standing up for the artistic and cultural resources available, even to the point of being subversive. And so it was during our information day at the Vienna Urania as well. I thought, yes, we do have resources to carry us forward…now as then…probably better now than then. And yet: the situation in our world is curiously unclear: people may mean well and want to do good, but we don’t know what’s good for us. The new EU tendering regulations, of course, chime perfectly with current elite management-speak. In this creative economic jargon, it’s all about manufacturing a public, and, basically, the EU Support Programme is about performance-related professionalization of human capital in the Arts and the Media. So far so good – or so bad. We had a packed programme at the Urania; there was, for example, a talk by Kathrin Röggla, which really stirred things up: Time’s too short – The Arts and the Market. There were project reports and previews. To sum up: the Arts have long been part of a world of increasing economic cut-backs and so must conform to the logic of the entertainment and media industries. But in spite of everything, those involved in the Arts and who apply for grants from Creative Europe, can be subversive, inflammatory and innovative. We’re not yet done with our democratic, Utopian society… Now, back to those feelings I found hard to describe… I have strong feelings about every statistic I read about the market for books, every analysis about people’s reading habits, every forecast about socio-cultural developments. It’s because experience has taught me that wanting to do good brings with it the knowledge that this doesn’t necessarily produce good outcomes. And this makes some people cynical, whilst others press on undeterred. In this respect, during the afternoon session at the Vienna Urania, I listened thoughtfully to what Barbara Gessler had to say. She’s head of the Arts Department of the Education, Audio-Visual and Culture Executive Agency in Brussels, which handles the EU’s Arts projects. I was struck by how un-bureaucratic she was, and how supportive of people in the Arts, as she talked through the new support programme. I’m sure I’m right, when I say she thinks European, she is open-minded and her attitude to European projects, from a practical point of view, stems from her desire to support both big and small, lightweight and experimental. In a word, I was listening to a civil servant who sympathised with Arts personnel and encouraged, for example, Austrian publishers to include foreign authors in their lists – and to get support for this from the EU. So why don’t these publishers do this? Michael Stejskal, from the film distributors Filmladen und Votiv-Kino, gave us his views on EU policy on the promotion and marketing of European films. To summarize: he said these policies had led to rushed and excessive film production. No-one any longer has the time to think through and develop their ideas. People can only survive, if they keep on churning out films, they can only finance their existence through new projects. This means too many films are being made, which in any case are too much for the audience to watch. And everybody is sick and tired of this value-added conveyor belt. And in the matter of books: novels disappear from the list after three months – that’s a fact. There are so many new books, there aren’t enough readers. Stejskal’s advice: the cultural landscape survives, but these policies are turning it into a cultural wasteland. As for literature more generally, every book that isn’t published is a market gain for publishing. Everyone’s writing, no-one’s reading. Everyone’s doing something, everyone’s got too much to do. What Stejskal was suggesting, with his legendary Viennese disaster-laden cynicism, is something all of us involved with the Arts have thought about at some point. And yet, Barbara Gessler’s face justifiably darkened at this. Interesting to hear…but there was bafflement on all sides. How could it be: not to write a book, not to publish it, this would improve the market? This just didn’t fit our mind-set. On the contrary, an archive of out-of-print and unread books on the Internet: even the greatest minds of the past couldn’t have dreamt that up!